A Kindness From Pain.

Bill Walton's extraordinary gift

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Bill Walton’s capacity for kindness was so boundless, I’m not sure death will curb it. If you knew him only as a hyperbole-spewing word-salad machine on NCAA and NBA broadcasts, you probably wouldn’t catch or even imagine that, but it’s true. He was possessed of the sort of all-enveloping kindness that had no qualifiers.

But that capacity did not come naturally; it stemmed instead from deep personal pain, rooted in a hurt so severe that Walton for a time pondered killing himself just to end the hurt.

Not everybody knows that about Walton, either. I suspect it’s not as easy to be a caricature as one might think.

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Walton died Monday at age 71, but that’s 15 years longer than he figured. It was in 2009 that the multiple Hall of Fame basketball player found himself in such excruciating pain from his hopelessly ruined spine that he sometimes lay on the floor for days at a time, thinking about ending it.

He has said that if he had a gun then, he would have used it. And when Walton said that, he was being literal. The pain was too much. He was virtually housebound. He took his meals lying down. Over a period of three torturous years, he had slowly cut himself off from a world he loved.

“Although I had a great family and wonderful friends, my life was so limited, so painful, so empty, I was ready to end it,” Walton once said. “I found myself searching for bridges. I was looking for the highest ones, with the longest of falls and the hardest of bottoms.”

It was an eight-hour, side-entry spinal fusion surgery that likely saved Walton’s life — a radical procedure at the time, more common now. After a year of rehab, Walton one morning was gently lifting light weights when he realized that he no longer felt any pain. He had his life back.

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If you heard Walton happily babbling on a college or NBA hoops broadcast over the past several years, comparing a player to Michelangelo or Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi (he did in fact do all of these things), you could be forgiven for wondering who was this goofball who wouldn’t stop talking while you were trying to watch the game. In truth, Walton was so enthusiastic to be alive that he couldn’t stop loving it out loud.

And if you wondered about Walton’s specific way of intoning…each…word…as…he…spoke, just know it was also by design. But Walton wasn’t trying to be difficult or memorable. As a kid and then a high-school prodigy in San Diego, he had grown up with a stutter so debilitating that he feared he’d never be able to speak regularly, in complete sentences.

Walton often said that overcoming his stutter was the greatest accomplishment of his life. His staccato delivery on the air was just a way for him to be sure he could get through all the words safely. Every sentence was a victory.

Two-time NCAA champion, NBA champion, Most Valuable Player, Hall of Famer, war protestor, Deadhead, decorated analyst — Walton wore many hats. But his own life experience ultimately led him down the path of pure kindness. He completely understood what it was to be human and have human moments, and so he decided a long time ago to err on the side of being good to people.

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During my radio days, we had Bill on as a guest several times. He always delivered. If you happened to catch one of those segments, you’d have thought we were all the best of friends. Walton made everybody feel like that.

He once saw me courtside at the press table before a Kings-Clippers game and proceeded to compliment my column writing at great length and tremendous volume. I laughed in the moment, then realized later that he was putting on such a show because he knew I was surrounded by my professional peers, who would hear his kind words. It cost Bill nothing; that’s how he saw it.

He was kind to our kids when, during an NBA trip to China in 2004, we happened upon him outside our hotel. It pained him dreadfully at the time to bend his 6-foot-11 frame down to their little height, but he did it anyway so they wouldn’t be afraid of this giant towering above them. Walton only did that about 1,000 times that day.

I’m saying that his off-screen persona was a gentler version of the person you saw. He was a tremendous believer in personal notes, texts and emails of encouragement to others. He routinely reminded people that they were the greatest in living history at whatever they happened to do.

Walton refused to be in a hurry; he took time to talk to anyone he saw along his path. He ended most of his missives to others with, “Thank you for my life.”

So yes, he was a cartoon character on TV. And he was a person who experienced tremendous emotional and physical trauma (39 surgeries on his back, knees and ankles, by the way). And he was sort of proudly a citizen of Earth and Elsewhere, if you know what I mean. And he was — how to put this — kindness-forward for the balance of his life, which ended Monday after a long battle with colon cancer.

And we barely talked about basketball today. Maybe some other time.

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